Eternal Return
by templremus1990
Summary: Jack nears his end. But, as someone once said, the moment has been prepared for. Timey-wimey fic; Doctor/Jack pairing.


_**A/N: Written for the 'timey-wimey' challenge on the LJ community, Winter Companions. Two teeny-tiny references to 'Torchwood: Children of Earth', but no serious spoilers if you've followed Jack's story in 'Doctor Who' up until 'End of Time'.**_

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**Eternal Return**

The Face of Boe was dying.

Or, rather, he had decided that he must be. This was not like the other deaths, the sudden sickening wrench into darkness and the ensuing stab of reanimation. This was a degeneration; a sense of horizons falling away, of all creation folded up around him like the collapse of a star, and it seemed to go on for millennia.

He'd lived through the destruction of worlds, his own homes, again and again. None of their passings had felt quite as final as this. Perhaps he'd outlived life itself.

Or perhaps the next stage in his evolution had finally arrived, and Time was taking away with one hand what it had bestowed with the other. Perhaps it would go on taking, bleeding him like a forever-open wound until everything else had left him except existence. An eternity of utter, yet fully conscious blindness; wasn't that some people's definition of hell?

Such was the Face of Boe's reasoning. But for now he did nothing to fight the decline; instead, in a strange way, he found that it brought him peace. After billions of years and countless lives, a narrowing in the scope of the cosmos came as something of a relief. He had seen too much, suffered and carried with him far too many injuries, for it to be otherwise.

At night, the Sisters of Plenitude would sit beside him. He would fill their minds with glimpses of previous eras, recalling stories and songs from his old ways of being- songs that Alice had sung to Steven, back when he was Jack and the Earth had still held him within its orbit. Songs that the boys he had loved had learnt, or listened to, as they went off to war; songs that they had sung on their return, or at their comrades' deaths. Songs for the ends of ages.

For a long while, the thought of what was lost had brought more pain than tenderness. But though time could not heal the wound, it had offered him the perspective of eternity, and for that he was grateful; before the entire Universe's suffering, and all its wonder, even his own impossible life dwindled to a single, unchanging point. His fellow patients at the hospital were good to him, in the respectful way that he recognised from friends' deathbeds, and if he didn't yet understand, he knew nonetheless that it had to be so. He slept, and dreamt of the day he had watched the Earth burn; the day, less far gone than the rest, when his past had returned, however briefly. In other such unconscious journeys he spoke to leaders of armies, and walked across distant planets, and saw solar systems rise; and the same man with many faces ran through the whole constellation of them.

From some small, forgotten corner of his psyche, a single dream called out.

_Ward 26 - Please come. _

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"I'm here. I might look a bit different, but it's me."

Not so very different, but- young. Unfinished, the Ten that he had known and the one before him now like comparing the foundations of a building with the entire structure. But the _mind_; the mind was wonderful, as bright and as sharp and as brilliant as he remembered it.

He didn't quite enter, merely crept alongside; observing, not passing through. It was the only consciousness in the Universe whose nature even came close to his, and it deserved respect. When he came to the Time Lord's memories, those endless rows of doors, he did not touch the days that had been; they weren't his to change, or his to hold. Instead, he looked towards the days that could be. Slowly at first, and blindly, like a man feeling his way through a darkened room. Then, little by little, the landscape opened out, and with it came the reawakening of a sensation that he had not realised he had lost.

It felt like hope.

Treading so lightly that even the Time Lord barely felt his presence, he glanced over door after door and room after room. In their arrangement, he saw his future, and his past, and picked out a road through both.

"We shall meet again, Doctor; for the third time, for the last time, and then the truth shall be told."

As the Doctor had seen it, and as _he_ had chosen, so it would be.

The Universe owed them that much.

* * *

In the years that followed, the Face of Boe encountered two new Doctors, and one that he had already chanced upon. All were the same man, and all were different; both these facts were true, and at the same time.

He loved each and every one of them, of course.

* * *

Thirteen was bold, and bitter, and talked with a furious urgency that was very aware of how quickly time passed. In his mouth, personal revelation became a duty; determined not to let the memories fade, he handed them on to others whenever the chance arose. The Face of Boe listened with equal determination. Stories were all that sustained him, these days, and though the ending might arrive too swiftly, some parts of the story were yet to follow.

On one occasion, the Doctor had knelt down, and pressed his hand to the glass; not in contemplation, as Ten had done, but as if to preserve the contact. There was possessiveness, and desperation to the gesture- which pleased the Face of Boe. It meant that the will to survive still burnt strong inside him.

This Doctor would hold on as long as he dared. For now, he only smiled his unfamiliar, too-tight smile, and stood.

"I'll be back soon, old friend."

The Face of Boe laughed, silently, because 'soon' meant nothing to him anymore.

* * *

He saw Eleven several times, at the back of museums while people stared at him, or through the crowds of a public gathering. Many of these other observers asked him questions, but only some listened to the answers; the rest made up their own, or embroidered upon the myths. Within just a few generations the Face of Boe had become a whole race. Scattered across the galaxy, Boekind lived on, and he was the first and the last and everybody in between. He was his own, self-perpetuating legend, almost anywhere he went, but Eleven blocked his ears to the tale; looked away, and hurried on. The Face of Boe never resented him for it, as the young Jack Harkness might have done. After the 456 had forced him from the slow path Jack had travelled far and changed still further; and now the Time Lord bore a look that he recognised, during his brief glimpses of that young-old face.

Here was a Doctor still running from his past, in whatever form it might take.

* * *

The last time he had met Twelve- before New Earth and the plague-carriers-, they had both been a great deal younger, and it showed. By their next reunion there had been a fresh loss, and now Twelve wore his body with less confidence, and a small degree of misgiving. Something irrecoverable in him had slipped away.

Twelve clung to people as a child did to familiar surroundings, cherishing them dearly and keeping them close by at all times, until some shift occurred to force him unwillingly onwards. He would recover, and learn the contours of a new relationship, but the parting was always hurtful, and almost never simple. Then again, hardly anything was simple, where the Doctor was concerned. Jack knew this more than anyone.

Before long another companion had moved on; then another, and another. Twelve came to him alone every time, crouching down to his old friend's eye level; this regeneration was shorter than the last one, and when he stooped he seemed slighter still. Some days they barely exchanged greetings, but stayed side-by-side; touching without touching, the simple contact of mind against mind that was more profound than any language. Neither of them looked into the other's closed doors.

Other days were full of recollection. Wordlessly, they opened up doors that had long been sealed off, and allowed each other in.

Where they could- where the memory was not too bright, or too painful-, they even smiled.

At long, long last, there arrived a day when Twelve returned, unaccompanied as always, his present incarnation looking older and smaller than it had ever done, and the Face of Boe had no comfort left to offer. Deep down, both knew that the end of something was approaching. Both, too, were ready to let it come.

Twelve rested his forehead against the glass, eyes half-shut.

"Got to go." He muttered. The Face of Boe agreed.

* * *

By the time he landed back on New Earth, it was to a planet seething with disease and dying from the outside in.

Novice Hame, when she found him, had aged only a fraction of the years that he had; but she was wiser too, and more compassionate. It never even occurred to him not to keep her safe. Forgiveness no longer mattered much, and he didn't offer it, either. Instead they wove themselves into the city, and waited for the foreseeable future.

It drew near, and brought the Doctor with it.

The Ten who faced him now was closer to the one that he had travelled with. He held himself at a slight distance, and a weight had descended into his gaze. Although he was still incomplete, still rough around the edges, the Face of Boe remembered Martha, and understood that she would see to the rest. Before then, there was the city below to think of. Not-quite Ten leapt to the challenge, with the astonishing alacrity that was a constant of all the Doctors.

His brilliant and alien mind blazed, and darted, and found a solution, where none had appeared to exist.

"Ah, you've got power! You've got _me_!" he cried, and the Face of Boe didn't have to believe him, since he knew it to be true.

But the next instant the plan had broken apart around them.

"The transformers are blocked. The signal can't get through."

The panic felt horrifying, but also so _right_, because this was the Doctor, who he had always loved, who would always rage against what did not have to be, and _this_-

This was the moment.

_Doctor...I give you my last..._

With one outward breath, the Face of Boe poured the entire of time and space into the breach; gave back what had been granted, the gift that had been forced upon him against his will, and it went readily from him. As it did so- as his whole self disintegrated-, he brushed against the Time Lord's subconscious, and sensed his own wrongness within the Universe unravel. Creation turned upon a new axis now.

_Yana_. He rolled the syllables inside his mouth, testing the feel of them. These words deserved to be said aloud.

"You- are not- alone."

The Doctor's third. And _his_ last. Everything had come to its completion.

Jack closed his eyes, and allowed Time to take him.


End file.
